Jimbo Thiels - Tunk’s Cypress Inn Restaurant
Jimbo Thiels 
Tunk’s Cypress Inn Restaurant
Words of Wisdom
- Whatever it takes, you have to be willing to dedicate that time and that effort, and realize you aren’t going to get any sleep, because you are the boss.
- You can’t be the bartender, plus the bouncer, the cashier and the host or hostess. You can only be one of those things at a time. Learn all those jobs so you can put yourself in that situation when that person isn’t there.
- If you want to have a successful food service operation, you have to have a key person in the back of the house, plus a key person out in the front.
- Have accountability in every aspect of your business. If you can’t count it, can’t weigh it, and if you don’t know exactly what you are doing with it, then don’t sell it. You have to spend a lot of time making sure that everything you put out there makes you money.
- Take advantage of every piece of technology that gives you a track record of not only where you are going, but also where you’ve been
- Have a plan to go into business, but after you get your business established and it becomes profitable, begin thinking of an exit strategy.
ELS Mentor Interview
Jimbo Thiels & Wife
Tunk’s Cypress Inn Restaurant
Location: Tunks, located on beautiful Kincaid Lake, eight and a half miles past the Coliseum.
Date: August 27, 2009
Interviewer: Gary Perkins & Felix Mathews
Gary: “Tell us a little bit about your background, your family, where you were born and raised.”
“I was born in Alexandria, raised on a 65-acre tenant farm, very close to where Tunk’s is today, on the north side of Highway 28 West. We raised cotton, corn, soybeans, hogs, pigs, chickens and lots of vegetables. We ate everything we raised because there was Mama, Daddy and twelve kids. I went to school at Catholic Schools in Alexandria (St. Rita, and Menard). I went to LSU in Baton Rouge for a year, LSUA for one semester, and graduated from Northwestern in Natchitoches.
“We were involved in 4-H activities a whole lot because of the kind of life we led, and because the kind of organization 4-H was. I participated in the first Rapides Parish Fair at the Coliseum, and have been hanging around that ever since.”
Gary: “What year was the first fair?”
“I want to say 1960 probably was the first year. I think the Coliseum wasn’t ready the first year it was there. Uncle Felix’s Daddy, my Grandpa, Ned Mathews, did a whole lot of the work on preparing the fair grounds and setting up the tent area. Everything was in tents; the Coliseum was under construction.”
Gary: “The rodeo parade used to come out to the Coliseum.”
“Right, that was the Amicus Rodeo Club.”
Felix: “So, out of Northwestern, when you graduated, what business did you go into, or did you go into business?”
“I went to work for a Fortune 500 Company, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which, at that time, was the largest tobacco company in the United States. I was a tobacco products promoter for Winston-Salem and Camel cigarettes, Day’s Work and Prince Albert Chewing and Smoking Tobacco. I had a five-parish area that started in Pineville, went to the Mississippi River, then up to Tensas Parish and down to Avoyelles Parish. For a good while, I had a ten-parish area that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Texas line that included Vernon, Winn, Natchitoches, plus several other parishes. I called on wholesalers, retailers, vending machine operators and military bases like Fort Polk, the Air Force base, VA Hospitals and others.”
Felix: “What happened after that, and how did you and your wife go into this business?”
“Kincaid Lake came about after a whole lot of years of everybody saying it was coming. Right after I graduated from college, it was an actuality, and my father-in-law, Tunk Andries, built a boat landing on the lake. The land where Tunk’s Cypress Inn stands today was already in the family. He and his friends would sit on the porch at the landing, shooting the breeze, talking about fishing and God only knows what else, and everybody would say, 'Tunk, you ought to build a restaurant over there. Look at that point, it’s ideal, right there by the water.’
“After several months of people telling Tunk that, he started believing it. However, being a farmer, and either on or just off the Police Jury, he knew he didn’t have time to do it. He asked my wife, Sandy, and I if we would be interested in operating that kind of business. We told him we would, but we didn’t know anything about it and decided to start investigating it.
“We went with him to several places in South Louisiana. His wife, Ms. Nanette, liked Pat’s down in Henderson and Papaw’s in Lake Charles—all places similar to what we thought we’d like to have.
“Mr. Tunk had a friend named Fred Barksdale, an architect in Alexandria. They met on the Chamber of Commerce farm city tour they had every year. Mr. Tunk went to him with an idea of what he wanted to build and Fred drew the plans. After about a year of construction, it was completed in 1978, and March 21st was the first day of operation.”
Felix: “Where did the lumber for this building come from?”
“All the lumber, as our name suggests, is locally grown Louisiana cypress. Mr. Tunk bought board feet from anybody he could, plus he had some already stored. The cypress stump out front and the salad bar wood came out of Sieper Creek. It was a standing tree. Mr. Tunk and Mr. Peck Leavines, a local logger, cut it down from inside a boat and nearly drowned themselves. They brought it home, dried it out, and put it out there. It’s still holding up.”
Felix: “What were some of the major challenges that you faced from that day to now?”
“A major challenge was that I didn’t have any money. Mr. Tunk took care of the construction, but my wife and I wanted to help out. It’s a good thing to be financially involved in anything you’re in, because it makes you appreciate it more, and makes you realize that this is part mine; I’m going to have to make it work. We got an SBA loan from what was then Security Bank, because Rapides wouldn’t give us one. Rapides didn’t want to fool with SBA loans. We got the loan and borrowed about $55,000 to get furniture, fixtures, and equipment.”
Gary: “I bet it was a lot of money to you then.”
“I remember walking from Mike Wahlder’s office to the Security Bank to sign the papers. Mike asked me what I thought about borrowing all that money and I told him it really didn’t bother me; I’d borrow two million if they’d let me have it. He told me I was crazy.
“I really didn’t have any concept of how much money that was. I knew that I had to make a payment of $800 a month for seven or eight years to pay back the loan. I made a business plan on how I planned to operate the business, named how many employees I was going to have, where they were going to be, what they were going to do, and how much I was going to have to pay them, based on wages at that time. I figured I’d have to take in somewhere between $800 and $1000 a day to make the operation work. It didn’t take long before we realized those number were not reality.”
Felix: “Was there someone back then that you could seek business advice from, someone who mentored you?”
“I went to several restaurant people in town. Roland Metrejean had the Colonial Restaurant at that time, and we talked a little bit. He told me I could do anything I wanted, I could even work in his kitchen if I wanted to. Roland told me a lot of times that I had to be nuts, Mr. Tunk had to be nuts, and there was no way in hell people were going to drive that far out of town to go eat. How big a mistake was that? I never did go work for Roland, but I did talk to him a lot. I also talked to Ms. Chandler, who owned Leroy’s, and she was very helpful. She introduced us to people we bought things from.
“The most helpful person was Floyd Johnson, who owned the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. He and Clyde Pospisil were one of the first people to have a camp at Kincaid Lake. We bought a lot of our equipment through Floyd. We also bought a lot from Robert’s Refrigeration, in LeCompte, which is now Louisiana Food Service Equipment, and from Wayne Gremillion, who had Cenla Restaurant Supply on Lee Street.
“We hired Barney Burnaman, ‘Big B.’ He applied for the job as head cook and was a great cook and a great advisor. He gave us a whole lot of recipes we still use today and helped us with pricing and ordering.
“The one thing he didn’t have was a car. I remember going to pick him up early in the morning. We were open on Sunday at that time, and served lunch from 11 to 2. He’d have a lunch special every Sunday morning that might be a small T-bone steak, chicken and dumplings, or some type of home cooked meal. People really flocked out here on Sunday for lunch.
“I remember that after we first opened up, we were overwhelmed by the prep work. I’d leave here at one or two o’clock in the morning and then have to return two hours later so I could keep ahead of what we needed to do. We didn’t buy a bunch of pre-breaded products; we peeled our own shrimp, butterflied them, and then breaded them ourselves. We made everything from scratch, and we never knew what we were going to end up with at the end of the day.
“We might plan to cook some things for two or three days, but sometimes we ran out of it in one day. The next day we had to go back and start again. That’s one of the things I think people need to be aware of when they start a new enterprise: You do whatever it takes, and you have to be willing to dedicate that time and that effort, and realize you aren’t going to get any sleep, because you are the boss. When I was in college, I always said if I ever got out of school, I was going to sleep just as late as I wanted to. It hasn’t happened yet.”
Gary: “Do you still remember what it was like that first week you were in business?”
“I remember vividly what it was like the first night, because we had a private party for our Valley Farmer’s Co-op. The bankers, chemical companies and seed dealers all got together with the farmers to promote their products and get the farmers to buy their brands. That first night we had about 120 people; the seed companies paid for it. Everybody got a seafood platter and a cup of gumbo, but I don’t remember what they had for dessert. I think the ticket was about eight hundred dollars to feed all those people, so it must have been eight or nine dollars each.”
Felix: “And you still serve Ms. Mamie’s gumbo?”
“We use a lot of her recipes. Ms. Mamie was my wife’s grandmother. We also use Sandy’s mother’s recipes. She helped us in the restaurant, as did all of my family. I had eleven brothers and sisters; every one of them worked here from time to time. I’d call them and they would come to help at night or on weekends. A lot of times, I’d call my mother and say I need three people tonight. Mama would find somebody to help. My sister, Connie, is running the cash register now. She probably started out busing tables.
“It’s good to have somebody you know you can count on to handle the money, because that’s the one thing that is very, very important. It’s also important to have somebody out there smiling and interacting with the customers and who can take phone calls.”
Felix: “Were there any major obstacles that you experienced, and how did you overcome them if there were?”
“There were a lot of obstacles. It’s hard to pinpoint one for that first night, because the first day I ever worked for a restaurant in my life, I was the manager. That’s an obstacle. You have to depend on people you hire to do certain jobs, but I think one of the things that helped us overcome our lack of knowledge was that we were willing to work, were fairly well educated, and were eager to learn.
“I thought I was going to learn everything and do every job. I didn’t realize how far it was from one end of the place to the other or from the front to the back. I learned I couldn’t be the bartender, plus the bouncer, the cashier and the host or hostess. I could only be one of those things at a time. I did, however, learn all those jobs, plus all the jobs in the kitchen so I could put myself in that situation when that person wasn’t there.
“Archie Villard, owner of the Double V Cafe, was coming out here all the time and I always sat at his table and talked with him when he came in. He told me I was lucky I had a good woman for the back of the house and myself for front of the house. That’s one thing that’s key to a successful food service operation; you have to have a key person in the back of the house plus a key person out in the front. I’ll always remember him telling me that.”
Felix: “Are there any successes or things, maybe through expansion, you endured that stands out?”
“We started off with a little small lounge, and we added on a room in the back with a wooden floor and a stage. We had bands on Friday and Saturday nights. I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but it didn’t last too long, just a few years. What really helped out was that we turned that room into a banquet room that we could use for overflow dining on the weekends.
“We turned our original bar into a banquet room, so we had three banquet rooms. That became very important, because during slow times we could use them for private parties. At Christmas we have a lot of parties; sometimes three different banquets in one night. There aren’t a lot of places that have the benefit of an extra room.”
Felix: “What about the oyster bar. Whose idea was that and has that been successful?”
“That was my idea and it’s still successful. It definitely hasn’t reached its maximum success, but it has a lot of potential, and there are things we could change to make it better. I built it because we had overflow crowds every Friday and Saturday night. I figured there had to be a way to make money from all the people standing on the porch.
“I built a small area downstairs, fixed it up, and once it was in operation, we sold drinks and oysters on the half-shell. It was doing really well. Then we got a guy to come in to do a little entertainment, and people were hanging out the door—nobody else could get in it. So I said we’d do a little more. We got down under the building with a bobcat and a little small mini excavator I rented and dug out under the building. Mr. Tunk was worried the whole building would fall into Kincaid Lake, but it didn’t. We already had electricity and a roof because it was under the restaurant. I started putting the bands outside and people were sitting everywhere. Every Friday afternoon I had to go down there and move the lumber to one corner to cover it up. It was just amazing.
“That was before all the chain restaurants moved into the area. Our Friday and Saturday night wait crowd has dwindled, but the oyster bar is doing well, and we started serving a full line of food down there. People call in orders from their boats, especially in the spring and summer. They can order from the same menu we have up here, and we put the food in little boxes. It’s really worked out well.”
Gary: “Jimbo, I have always admired your marketing. Who helped you with your marketing? By the time I moved to Alexandria in 1989, I think there was an ‘I ate alligator at Tunk’s’ bumper sticker on every car in town.”
“I really don’t know who started that, but we still give those away. There are people who come back and tell me they saw one on an airplane in Saudi Arabia, on a freeway in California, or in Alaska. You see them all over the world. I don’t know whose idea it was to do the alligator bumper sticker, but it was my idea to start selling alligator. We did that when alligators came off the endangered species list. When they had the first alligator season, I thought it might be a good idea, so I went down to Marksville and talked to some people I knew from my tobacco days. They told me about some people who were getting alligator permits. I bought some, started frying it, barbequing it, and making sauce piquant with it; it was a natural hit. We just kept on adding to our formula.
“As far as marketing is concerned, I don’t know. KRRV opened up the same year we did. Lovely Patricia came out, we hit it off really well, and she started doing commercials with me in them. Jack Sharp was also very, very talented, and made up so many crazy commercials that seemed to fit my personality. People already knew I was kind of halfway crazy, so we played the commercials a lot, and it worked out real well.”
Felix: “You didn’t use an advertising agency?”
“No, we did it ourselves. We bought the advertising, placed it where we wanted it, and we did the whole Bubba and Eugene thing with the prettiest cow, Mark Smith from Cenla Motor Sports, the Giant Crawfish commercial, and a lot of other great commercials. They just all seemed to work out; everything turned into a campaign, one thing after another.
“Everybody seemed to want to get into our crazy Tunk commercials, especially the guy over at 104.3. His name was Randy Reynolds. He wrote one commercial for me about politics and stuff like that; they even played it in a station close to Baton Rouge a couple of times. People say we overspend on our advertising. I’m sure we do in some ways, but we’re not on MacArthur Drive, and we don’t have people just drive by and say, ‘That looks like a nice place to eat; let’s stop there.’”
Gary: “There’s no highly visible sign. You’ve got to know where it is.”
“If their destination is a restaurant, I feel people have to be reminded a little bit more.”
Gary: “It was a genius move, all those crazy things. If you were going to start today would you do anything differently?”
“Yes, I’d do a lot of things differently. First of all, I’d probably know what I was trying to do. My idea of a restaurant was some place you went to eat, and then when you got finished, you walked by the cash register and paid. I really didn’t know anything about the restaurant business. My wife has a degree in Dietetic and Institutional Management. She worked for Head Start and Texada Bailey Food as a quality control technician, and her last job was at Rapides Regional as a food service supervisor. She had a lot more food service experience than I did, but all the places she worked, she didn’t have to worry about making money. She just had to worry about performing a service. You really need to know where you are going, how you’re going to get there, plus you need to know what things cost. You need to know how you are going to get that money back and make a profit. My advice to myself, if I was opening now, would be to have a lot more accountability in every aspect of the business. If you can’t count it, can’t weigh it, and if you don’t know exactly what you are doing with it, then you don’t need to sell it. Everything has to be accountable to be successful. You have to spend a lot of time making sure that everything you put out there makes you money. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time.”
Felix: “Any other advice you can give? I’m thinking of our young entrepreneurs that are just getting started, the first year or second year.”
“I think they need to take advantage of every piece of technology that gives you a track record of not only where you are going, but where you’ve been. There’s lots of things out there now, point of sale systems, that tell you exactly what you sold, and you can do so many things with them—daily reports that tell you what you sold, etc. If I know there are a thousand Cokes in the building, I can input a thousand Cokes into the system. Every time the waitress presses that button, it counts down, and I know that at the end of that night, I better be able to balance the number of Cokes sold against the number the point of sales (POS) indicates, or I have a problem. It’s the same thing with every item we sell. Take advantage of technology and all types of experience. I always told myself that for every employee I’ve ever had, I learned something from them. It might not be something good, but they all taught me something. You better be ready to learn, and you better remember those lessons.”
Gary: “I always say the ones that cost me the most money, I remember the best.”
“Always remember that everybody you hire or do business with were not all raised the same way you were. They don’t have the same ethics, religious beliefs, conscience, or whatever you want to call it. Unfortunately, some will steal from you. You need to have some type of security. Everybody loves to eat, and a lot of them drink. And, a lot of them wear big pockets for a reason. You better have some way to lock things up and make sure things don’t disappear when you aren’t around.”
Gary: “So you weren’t an accountant when you started. How did you keep track of everything? Now that you’ve learned how valuable that was, how did you get started?”
“We used the people I had, like Mr. Burnaman. He helped us price things out and figure out the way we should sell them. That’s great written down on paper, but it’s only good under ideal conditions. If you’re going to sell a ten-ounce steak and cut it yourself, you have to take into consideration whether it’s a ten-ounce steak, an eleven-ounce steak, or a nine-ounce steak. You’ve got to make sure that’s what you’re actually selling. That’s why I say it’s good to be able to count it, weigh it and measure it. We learned after a few weeks that we weren’t making money or weren’t making the kind of money we thought we should be.
“One of the men I went to college with, who was efficient in accounting helped us. He came over, we talked about the business, and then he did a few reports that showed which things weren’t like they were supposed to be. Then we went to Mr. Louis Vanderlick, who was a bookkeeper, not an accountant. Later we got a CPA. We went through a ‘hard knocks’ learning process, learning how to be accountable.”
Gary: “When I started in the restaurant business in the late seventies or the mid-seventies, it was all green ledger sheets. You had to track everything by hand. There weren’t any Quick Books or Peach Tree. There weren’t even personal computers.”
“We spent hours every night rectifying ticket sales. Sometimes people didn’t write the tickets at the table. Then they rang the ticket up, hung it on the wheel, and the people in the kitchen started calling it off to everybody. Sometimes they wrote it down again and hung it up. You had all these paper trails at the end of the night that had to be matched up, sometimes three or four copies. We didn’t know whether they wrote it down or didn’t write it down, or scratched it off later, or ran the ticket through twice. There are so many ways people can steal from you, but now, with the point of sale system, you can track everything everywhere.”
Gary: “All my young people think they’re the only ones that ever had employees call in sick.”
“That’s why I said it’s really good to learn every position in your business, because you never know when you’re going to have to fill that position. You might have to fire somebody in the middle of the shift for doing something that was horribly wrong. Employees have a million excuses for not coming in; they can make up some doozies. A lot of times, you catch them in lies. Employees are the biggest headache there is in operating a business, from recruiting, to retention, to training. There’s no work ethic anymore, and it’s hard to find high-quality employees, because if they’re highly skilled, they aren’t going to be looking for a job flipping hamburgers or waiting tables. I’m not saying they’re not good people, but if they have a whole lot of potential, they’re doing this just as a stopping off point for something else.”
Felix: “In closing, do you have any other comments or suggestions to share with other business owners?”
“Just make sure that if you go into business or if you think you want to go into business, make sure that you’re ready to make that commitment. Sometimes, if you think you’re going into a five-day a week business, it might have to be a seven-day a week business. It might end up being an all-day and half-the-night business to make it work. You can’t just say, ‘I’m just going to go from 8 to 5.’ Sometimes unpredictable things happen, whether in the restaurant business or any other business. You also need a plan to go into business, but as soon as you get your business established and it becomes profitable, you need to start working on an exit strategy, so you’ll know what you’re going to do after you get tired of this business, or if somebody comes and wants to buy it from you, etc. You really need to know what the next step is and plan for that.
“I’d like to say that I’ll offer any type of assistance to any person; especially this business that I know a little bit about, at any time, because it’s a demanding deal. You have to have commitment, and there’s no place you can get on-the-job- training, unless you work for a big chain or something.”
Felix: “We appreciate your participation in the program and will probably call on you.”
“I always thought that when all the chain operations came in, that that would be good for us. They hire about 35 or 40 percent more employees than they need, sometimes even more than that. I figured that they were going to have great training programs that sucked up all the people, but when they spit them out and start culling the ones that they didn’t need, for whatever reason, there would be a well-trained workforce out there for wait staff, cooks, etc.
“Well, that was a bunch of bull. Never happened. The chains have the same problems we do, they cull for the same reasons we cull. They keep the good ones and put the bad ones back out on the street.”
Gary: “I sometimes think about the restaurants that were in business in the early 90’s and the mid 90’s before the chains arrived. There aren’t many left. The chain restaurants came in and wiped almost everybody out.”
“There aren’t many left. Two that come to mind are Giamanco’s Suburban Garden and Lea’s of LeCompte. I’m sure that someday we will turn this operation over to the next generation, a young, eager entrepreneur. However, at the present time, we are enjoying the rewards of many years of hard work—not just the financial rewards, but the relationships we developed and cultivated with many CENLA families and businesses.”